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Benchs and infos about Filesystems!


qeldroma
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Some Months ago, i tested many filesystems under LM9.1 and figured out the performance and CPU-impact. Look at My Webpage (No panic, it's english ;-)).

 

Another thing is information in general. First of all, you have to seperate simple from professional filesystems. Under "simple" you will find:

  • FAT: This is the primary Windows3.xx/95/98/ME/XP-Home filesystem, under NT/2k/XP there is additionally NTFS. It just seperates the space in blocks and every block is addressed. This makes it fast, but unreliable. There are no further security or backup-functionalities. It is very slow on huge partitions, what lead to users, thinking that they HAVE TO part their disk in thousands of partitions for performance reasons :wall:
    This filesystem is the reason for defragmentation-tools, because it puts the data on the disk without any logic behind. Just takes the biggest free block and that's it.
  • ext2: This is the basic linux FS, similar to FAT but with unix-security-stamp. Because it is born under unix/linux, it is better using space on disk and of course, it is optimized for bigger partitions.

On the other hand are professional FS. One VERY important feature is journalling, what means, that every action is packed in a transaction and this transactions are logged. So after an error, the system can restore the data according to the log. Another thing is handling of huge storage. Not every FS is capable to do this performant. Think of the CPU-usage. A complex FS needs a lot of management in the behind, so a small CPU will slow down the fs:

  • NTFS: This Windows-FS has additional security-features, but is NOT journalling (or?). It takes about 10-20% of harddisk for a MFT-Block in which the disk is managed. It is much faster than fat, linux can only safely read it, writing support is pre-alpha.
  • ext3: This is nothing really new. It is just a ext2 with an additional information-handling-routine for journalling. So you can use it even without ext3 support in kernel. After an error, it is very slow (20Gig, 7 minutes) in recovering. Because it is based on ext2, many users are using it.
  • ReiserFS: This is an extraordinary FS. All Data is stored in a binary tree-modell, NOT concatenated in blocks. This makes it VERY performant on small files, what most files under linux are. For understanding, think of a pyramid of champagne glasses, one stands on two others, and you fill them from the top. That's simplified the way it works. If you understand that, you will notice, that it can't fragment, because it is based on fragmentation :lol2:. It is relative fast in repairing, but no speed-wonder. All-in-All the perfect FS for small-filed partitions, like /etc, /home, /var, etc...
  • XFS: This is new since about one year. It is a UNIX-based FS which is VERY professional. It has a whole bundle of extra features that are interesting for admins of storage-solutions. Rumours tell about it beeing very fast with huge files, i can't tell this, because it is as fast as ReiserFS as far as i can see. VERY good is repairing-time: it takes only seconds for my 20Gig-partition after an failure for restoring it.
  • JFS: As professional as XFS, but i only tried it once and had problems (a year ago). Perhaps it is stable by now. Rumours tell that it is not stable by now, don't know further.
  • Others: Many others are just for compatibility-reasons with unix-os.

Be aware that with every OS you are using, you are enlarging the kernel and reducing resources. That's why i only use three FS (FAT for windows, ext2 for boot and XFS for the rest).

 

Critics and additions are welcome :cheesy:

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